The big impact of small interactions

This rebroadcast originally aired on October 10, 2025.

A stranger holding the door open for you. A friendly wave from a neighbor. An angry driver cuts you off. The new book "The Social Biome" reveals how 'everyday communication connects and shapes us.'

Jeffrey Hall, department chair and professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas. Co-Author of "The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us."

Andy Merolla, researcher and professor in the department of communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Co-Author of "The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us."

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: I was on a plane last month heading from Boston up to Canada. Connecting flight in Toronto. And do not ask me why, but the flight was two hours late departing from Boston. If it had been on time, my daughter and I would've had a couple of hours to chill in our Toronto layover, but no. So the flight lands in Toronto. And of course, I am nervously staring at my watch over and over again.

So my daughter and I decide to get up as soon as the seatbelt light turns off and push ahead as many aisles as we can, as many rows as we can Now, I know. Trust me, I know this is not normal deplaning etiquette. So every row we passed, I said, I'm sorry, so sorry, we've got barely 25 minutes to catch our connection.

Sorry. I'm so sorry. Can you please let us through? Unfortunately, there is an unspoken comradery formed by the horrors of coach class flying. So most people were super understanding, which gave me hope. And then, all of a sudden, a man gets up and stands right in between me and my daughter.

Now, I usually do not care. I really genuinely do not care how a person looks. But this guy, 70 something, holier than thou affect, he turns and says to me in an arch voice, 'We let people in rows ahead of us get off first.' And then he proceeds to very slowly pack his small bag. Not because he was infirm mind you, but because, I don't actually know why, but he's just a jerk. Okay. And then he very slowly gets his carry on down from above. And of course I'm sweating by this time. And so I say sir, I am very sorry, but we only have a few minutes to make our connection. And then he turns to me, and he says, so do many other people.

This happened like a month ago, and I still have to take deep breaths. But then it gets worse. Because I seriously almost lost my mind when my daughter was actually able to press ahead and get off the plane. So I say, sir, that's my daughter there. I'd like to catch up with her. And he says, this is the one that takes the cake.

He says, that doesn't matter. Okay. I am very willing to be corrected on matters of fact. It happens here on the show all the time, or even given the side eye if I'm too hasty or told that I can generally up my game in being a decent human being, but oh my goodness. Nobody gets between Meghna Chakrabarti and her child, nobody.

Did I grit my teeth? Oh, heck yeah. Did I take deep breaths? Double heck, yeah. I did choose at that moment not to make a scene. Because finally, this guy, this gentleman, he started moving down the aisle, but then there was another man, a few rows up who was ready to get off the plane. He'd packed his bag, his backpack was on his shoulder, and then Mr. 'We let people in rows ahead, get off first' just walks right by this guy, blows right by him, doesn't let him off.

Now, I really do not want this to matter. Genuinely. I do not want this to matter, but my self-appointed etiquette coach was white and the man in the forward rows was brown, so I don't want to go there, but I will admit, my mind did.

So I just blurted out, Sir, I thought we let people in forward rows get off the plane first. Of course, he totally ignored me. And then we get off the plane. Finally. I meet up with my daughter. We literally sprint across Pearson Airport, which includes like going from the international arrivals to the domestic departures.

It was a super pain, but no, we did not miss our connection. But I swear it took me two full days to stop obsessing about how much I despise this man. And maybe I haven't actually gotten over it yet completely. Because Jeffrey Hall, you're a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, and please, please tell me, professor, that I should not lose all hope and faith in septuagenarian men in Navy blazers, gingham button downs, matching pocket squares, fancy loafers, and male pattern baldness, because I am still steamed by this professor.

JEFFREY HALL: Of course you are. Of course you're still steamed by this.

CHAKRABARTI: But why can't I let this go?

It's been a month, and it was like literally the whole interaction was probably three minutes if that.

HALL: Yeah. It's powerful, isn't it? One moment of interaction that we have in our lives can carry forward. It echoes throughout our entire life, and the good news is that these are probably also moments of positivity too.

One moment of interaction that we have in our lives can carry forward. It echoes throughout our entire life.

Jeffrey Hall

So yes, we will unpack and worry and steam and get angry, very rightfully, about the way that you and your daughter were treated. But we also have moments where people give us uplifting messages of hope. Of encouragement, of acknowledgement that our hard work is appreciated. And what's really difficult about the way that we're built is we pay so much more attention to those negative things than the positive ones.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. I did throw in that one line that just about every other person back in economy seating where we were was like, oh yeah, go ahead, go. We've been there too. Yeah. It was just this one guy, but here's, oh, I should probably actually introduce you before I take the rest of the show to basically have a therapy session.

But this is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti, and you're listening to Jeffrey Hall. As I said, he's a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, and he is co-author of a terrific new book. It's called The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us, and we will hear from your co-author as well in just a minute.

But before I let this story go, which I promise I will, I'm going to like meditate, I'm going to meditate until this man is meaningless to me, but it had this kind of, it had like spider legs in my life that crawled all over how I saw other people for a while. Like I was on high alert for being slighted again that way.

HALL: Yeah, absolutely. The ways in which these small moments of interaction infect the way that we feel about ourselves, the way that we feel about humanity in general, the way that it motivates or demotivates us to treat other people. A lot of times those negative interactions are ones that we need to work on and think about with our close others.

We turn to them for support and encouragement. We feel less inclined to care for one another in moments of indignity, of being slighted or being hurt. These carry really strong repercussions in all over moments of our days and weeks and months. So it's understandable that you're upset. And it's absolutely understandable that our social biomes, many times the fabric gets torn by those moments of feeling that someone is way out of line.

But again, as you said, you had an airplane full of people who understood, they understood what you were going through. They actually really were behind you. The hard part is that our kind of brains are wired for negativity biases. We often interpret threats to ourselves, our egos, or our face as being things we need to pay a lot more attention to because we want to keep us safe, want to keep us included.

Brains are wired for negativity biases.

Jeffrey Hall

So it's hard to dismiss those things. They're just really difficult to let go.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Even if they're just basically instantaneous. Exactly. And utterly meaningless. I wear a watch that has my heart rate on it, and I just noticed that I was going through that story again. I had a spike in my heart rate which usually does not happen during the show.

And now it's going back down.

HALL: I was going to say, me too. I was upset for you.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm so sorry. What you talked about how we're wired in our brains and let's highlight how social interactions and these are smaller social interactions, how they can wire us in a more positive way. Because deep breaths, I'm putting my airplane flight experience aside. Because we got a lot of stories from listeners about how small social interactions have impacted their lives.

And what was really interesting is most people sent us really good stories. So let's take this one for example. This is a story from On Point listener Elizabeth Guffey.

ELIZABETH GUFFEY: About five years ago, I got stuck at the bottom of my driveway in a snowstorm and couldn't get out. And I was shoveling away as truck after truck went by, splashing road slush up onto me.

And finally, somebody stopped by and a young woman got out of her car, grabbed a shovel out of her trunk and started shoveling next to me. And we got unstuck in about two minutes and as she went away, I thanked her and she said, Hey, everybody's got five minutes. And I've been living my life, telling that story and going by that mantra ever since.

CHAKRABARTI: Now that's the kind of social interaction we all yearn for, right?

HALL: Absolutely. And I love that phrase, everybody has five minutes. So much of the focus that Andy and I have put on this book is the idea that the time that it takes for us to make those social opportunities are actually less than we might perceive. A text message to a friend to catch up and say, I miss you.

What was that? 30 seconds? An opportunity to say, show some dignity to someone behind the counter at our coffee shop takes a minute. Many of the things that really matter in positively orienting us towards others, take very little time, but it requires us to reorient the way that we see the world as an opportunity, just like that young woman did, to help someone out right to be there for one another.

Many of the things that really matter in positively orienting us towards others, take very little time, but it requires us to reorient the way that we see the world as an opportunity.

Jeffrey Hall

And if we don't see those things in our lives, it's very hard to enact the benefits of those things.

CHAKRABARTI: Do you know the best thing I love about Elizabeth's story is that she says, ever since that one small moment, she's been living her whole life telling that story and going by that mantra. I mean, it has had actually a very transformative effect on how she walks through the world.

HALL: And these things can, right? We know that things like memorable messages of hope that tell us that we can live a life that's successful. Something beyond anything we would ever imagine from the home in which we grew up in. These messages make an enormous difference to carry us forward in times of doubt of ourselves.

And we have the power to be giving those messages to people constantly. Encouragement, validation, compliments for their existence. You matter to me in this moment. And if we did that a lot more, what's interesting is that we benefit from that. The empirical evidence, the experimental evidence is really clear.

These things matter for you, but it also matters for the person you're doing it for. It shows them dignity. It lets them feel appreciated. So in two ways we can think about it. One is, this benefits me, but another way it benefits the people that we care for as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Now one of the big takeaways I got from your book is, it's in the very name, the social biome, right?

Because we think of these small interactions as small, and so like you just move on and you don't consider them at all. But you and Andy point out that, in fact, if we just look at our interactions throughout a day. The vast majority of them are these like small interactions with people who are basically strangers.

HALL: That's right. And it's even higher for working adults. So there are plenty of studies using the method that Andy and I do in a lot of our studies, which basically says, let's contact people multiple times and say, what are you doing right now? And like a random sample of your days. And what we find is when people are in social interaction, about two thirds of their social interactions are actually with people that are what we called acquaintances or colleagues or strangers.

So a lot of our interactions are with people we don't know very well. And in a workplace, you can imagine why. You're interacting with clients, you're interacting with other sort of sources of information and people that it's really not something that requires you to be yeah. Really focused on that relationship and in one third of those things --

CHAKRABARTI: Actually, Professor Hall, can I just interrupt. Because we've got five seconds before our first break. And you hear this.

This is me crumpling up that story of that guy and I'm going to burn it in a fire later and let it go. We'll be back. This is On Point.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Hall, you were talking about how, especially for working adults, these sort of light acquaintance interactions are the majority that we have during a day.

HALL: That's right. And so for all of those kind of interactions that we have to reorient the way we think about it. So for our meaningful relationships with our partners, our romantic partners, our kids, these were ones we were actually a lot more familiar with in the sense that these matter for our wellbeing.

What new research is really uncovering is that these interactions we have with all of the other people in our life also matter for our wellbeing as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so now's the perfect time to bring in Andy Merolla. He's a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

And again, he's co-author with Jeffrey Hall of the Social Biome. Joining us from Santa Barbara. Professor Merolla, welcome to you.

ANDY MEROLLA: Hi, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. You know what, I'm gonna, I still need an antidote from that airplane guy. So I wanna share a couple of more good stories that On Point listeners sent us about small social interactions that left them feeling better about humanity.

This is David who has, of course, like any person, had both good and bad interactions. A bad one he talked about was once he did some basic electrical work for a friend, and then that friend just ghosted David. Stopped responding to texts or anything like that, interrupted their friendship. But then David decided instead to focus on some of the more positive interactions.

DAVID: I was in New Braunfels area of Texas driving in the hill country and saw a big sign for sourdough bread. But the bread loaves were like $8 a piece, which was too much. And I explained to the lady, oh yeah, I can't afford that much, 'cause I've been outta work for a couple of months and she gave me a free real of bread. And I tried to pay her $5, just at least something.

And she said, no, absolutely not. And the next time I come through, I will buy two and pay you for three.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. That's awesome. Yeah. Now, Professor Merolla, actually from both of you, but let me start with you. What's the story behind why you and Jeffrey decided to write this book to look into the impacts of these small scale communications.

MEROLLA: Yeah, so Jeff and I do research together and we had been studying social interaction, and we really wanted a survey in our research, at least, all the interaction we have. Which is including strangers, as you mentioned, acquaintances and our close relationships. But as we did that research, we also wanted to write about our ideas and the amazing research that's out there for different types of readers.

So certainly, researchers or graduate students, but also just folks who might be interested in this topic. And it was really exciting for us to try to put these ideas together in a book.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that's the academic and professional response. Jeff, I also heard that there's another story that linked you two.

HALL: Yeah, Andy and I met, I had known about his work before, but we met at a conference where we get to sit next to each other at a top paper panel at our national conference.

And what was so fun about it was we liked the same thing. So we'd be like, I love this kind of research. I'm not as fond of that kind of research. So we had this moment of realization that we had met a kind of a kindred spirit out there. And that moment I actually said, 'Hey, I'm doing this really neat work on experience sampling.' Which is what Andy was describing. And I invited him to say, 'Hey, we should work together in the future.'

And that's how it started.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh great. So experience sampling, that is fascinating. I hope you don't mind if I call you both Jeff and Andy.

HALL: No problem.

MEROLLA: No problem.

CHAKRABARTI: Is that okay? Okay. Usually I go with the formal, but I feel like no, please, in this show in particular, in this episode, I feel like in order to model what healthy interactions might be, like requesting a sense of comradery and maybe informality might help us get there.

Okay? ... So Andy I'd love to know more about how you and Jeff in the book talk about that social interactions are not just one thing or another. That in fact we as human beings, as pro-social, as a pro-social species, need a whole variety of types of interaction every day.

MEROLLA: Yeah, that's right.

So we need, we only have so much energy, right? Everybody understands that. And certain social interactions are more draining than others. And some of the interactions that really connect us to other people can be really what we call energy intensive, or they take a lot of our time and focus. So when somebody we care about really needs us, we have to give them our attention and we have to really be there for them.

But you also have these kinds of short, low energy interactions, a quick hello or a little bit of chitchat. Those can also connect you to other people. And if you think about the ways relationships develop, you have these kinds of small moments of interaction that can help develop new relationships.

If you think about the ways relationships develop, you have these kinds of small moments of interaction that can help develop new relationships.

Andy Merolla

So by having just a wide variety of relationships, we not only balance the energy we have to interact each day, but we help our current relationships stay strong and it gives us the potential to develop new ones. Okay, so again, our listeners delivered on examples that feed right into what both of you are talking about.

This is Eve Sloan. She's a new mom in Iowa, and she says being out in the world with her tiny baby has given her a number of small experiences and interactions that actually are making her look more positively on life.

EVE SLOAN: I'll be at a coffee shop or at the grocery store and people will go out of their ways to hold the door for me or let me go first in the line when they see my hands full with the car seat or fussy little one at times.

So those interactions make a huge impact on my day when a lot of the time I'm alone taking care of the newborn at our house. So when I am out and about, that's the interaction with people that I have. And a lot of the time it's positive.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, Jeff, what do you think about that?

HALL: Yeah, how beautiful.

I think we acknowledge that there are people in our world that may need our help, but a lot of times we're a little bit afraid of offering it. It makes us feel like we're imposing or suggesting that they can't do it. I think that there are little clues that we get sometimes that people need our help, and it's obvious to step in.

I think when people's hands are full, and especially with a new baby, we can say, yeah, okay, this is okay to help someone. So I think some of our reservations about reaching out to others or being kind to them partly comes from the idea that we don't think we can, we're not invited to do. So sometimes like a pet or a baby or something like that. We'll say, yeah, it's all right to talk to a stranger. It's okay to say, what's your dog's name? So what's interesting is when we open our eyes to the possibility of caring for one another, there are opportunities abound.

CHAKRABARTI: Why do we need the medium of a pet or a baby though, for this, because I totally understand what you mean.

Not only with my own kids when they were younger, but like our dog is the most popular member of our family out in the world. And I've met everyone in our neighborhood because of him. I wish I didn't. I love him, but I just wish I didn't actually need a dog to know who my neighbors are.

MEROLLA: Yeah, the same drive to connect that we have with other people.

We also have a drive to be polite and to not impose. And sometimes those things can be intention. Where you'd love to reach out and chat with somebody, but you also don't want to make it awkward or make them feel like they have to interact with you. And research suggests sometimes we have these expectations that the interaction's not going to be as positive as it actually is.

And when we interact in the social world, we're against some headwinds that keep us from engaging and they're not always for bad reasons that we don't connect. But as you mentioned, when there's maybe a baby or a pet, it helps us overcome maybe our reticence to talk to somebody we don't know.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so Andy, I want to hear more about this because you just said our expectations of the interaction may be, our expectations may be more negative than the interaction actually is. Every time I hear both of you describe what the social biome is I think to myself, what you're really describing is a novel way to look at what just our community cultures are like, and there's good aspects and bad aspects.

Just for a moment, if we can return to the more negative light interactions, it seems as if that's even a minor part of the culture, does it, Andy, does it create this like feedback loop in terms of how we end up treating each other?

MEROLLA: Yeah. Yes, it does. So thinking about what you mentioned about that interaction on the plane, right? That one interaction just overshadowed all the positive interaction you had. And in the literature, like the very well known marital research John Gottman has found that even when people who really know each other well interact, especially in challenging interactions, it takes about five positive communication behaviors to cancel out the effects of one negative one, right?

So the negative carries a lot more weight. And the social systems we exist in, which we use the term social biome, they create kind of baseline expectations for the interaction that's going to occur within that system. Let's think about, like, a workplace.

If the workplace really prides itself on warm, inclusive, welcoming communication. That creates opportunities that encourages people. Those are the norms that exist in that space, to help people reach out. They might be more willing to. If you're in a workplace that's really struggling and has really low morale and low levels of trust, that means all the interaction occurring within that system gets filtered through that low level of trust.

And that can keep people from engaging in interaction at all, but when they do, they're maybe filtering it through a greater sense of negativity or just not willing to engage fully with the other people. Jeff, it sounds like what you and Andy are revealing is that a huge amount of how we not only perceive, but experience the world is actually the sum of these small things.

Now, on the one hand, that might be quite hopeful. Because you think all we need to do is on a daily basis, maybe change some small interactions that we have. But on the other hand, I'm not sure we're ever really fully, most of the time we're not really conscious. We're not in conscious control of those interactions.

HALL: Yeah, the lack of conscious control, I think is a really key part here. We accept the world as it is a lot of times, and our politeness, norms, our reticence to talk to others, because we think we're being imposition, going along with whatever we expect in the world really creates those norms.

One example we talk about in our classrooms, but also in the book, is the idea that in large cities, the norms are very much not to talk to one another, not to make eye contact.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, yeah.

HALL: Yeah, and I lived in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. and very rarely would I talk to strangers, partly just because that was the norm of the community.

So what happens is, if you think on a big scale, like in the United States in general, as we see, there was broader trends of people spending less time being social, less membership in clubs and organizations, like Robert Putnam talked about. Less engagement in the people in your neighborhood. All of these things create a normative response that leads us to a broader sense of what we call in the book interiority.

Basically, we focus on ourselves, we focus on our own issues, our own concerns, and we do what we can to protect our little space and bubble. But the problem is the more we become interior, the more we become more selfish about the way that we see the world. The example of the gentleman on the plane that you mentioned, that is a very selfish point of view, but it's also born from an idea of, I uphold the rules in my world because I'm not obligated to one another to create a better space.

The more we become interior, the more we become more selfish about the way that we see the world.

Jeffrey Hall

CHAKRABARTI: In the distance of a month since I had that experience. I can also see that maybe he thought that he was not just upholding the rules in his space, but upholding the rules that he felt were necessary for a mutual respect of each other when it came to the confines of an airplane.

I will give him that. I just wish he hadn't gotten between me and my daughter. But Andy, so I remember I grew up in a medium sized town in Oregon where like literally everybody said hello to everybody on the street, even if you'd never seen them before and would never see them again.

And then in the second half of my life, thus far, I've been living in Boston. And as Jeff said it was a real social shock. Because saying hello, like people would look at me like I was about to kill them. And so I actually started playing a game because I was like, I can't. This was hard. It was actually hard for me.

And so I played a game of saying, of trying to say hello on the street to even more people, didn't quite work. But is there a way though to prevent the potential negative feedback that we've been talking about from continuing to cycle? Like how can we as individuals interrupt that?

MEROLLA: Yeah it's always going to be difficult for any one individual to change a social system. And one of the things we think is really important is just to realize how powerful interdependence is when we think about interaction. You can never control how someone's going to respond to your interaction, and that's just one of the hard truths of communication, interpersonal communication.

And so it's important to continue trying and then refine your approach. So if you're motivated to want to be kind to strangers or say hello, I think there's nothing wrong with continuing to do it. As long as you appreciate that there's nothing you can do to make them responsive to it. And the fact that they're not responsive to it doesn't in and of itself mean you're doing something wrong.

It's just the nature of interdependence and it's the power of social systems. A lot of what we do in our day-to-day life is from pressures that are just much larger than us, like the norms that govern interaction in the big city versus the small town or the smaller town.

CHAKRABARTI: When you said response, is this what you're talking about in the book when you mentioned perceived partner responsiveness?

MEROLLA: Yeah, so that's a really important concept. It was developed by a researcher named Harry Reis and his collaborators, and we really like this term. Because whereas there's this amazing research in communication and psychology that gets way down to the weeds, to the microscopic verbal and nonverbal.

Things that we do to create connection, perceived partner responsiveness, zooms out. And it tries to say, what are the essential features or perceptions of an interaction that connect people or make it rewarding? And so it's things like your perception of how respectful the person was towards you, how supportive and how validating they were towards you.

And we like this term because it's subjective. But people understand that this person made me feel good and/or made me feel welcome, and it's separate sometimes from the content. So it can be a sense for how welcoming and rewarding that interaction was.

CHAKRABARTI: Jeff, do you want to add to that?

HALL: Yeah. Only that if you think about it, you control your responsiveness to other people. So you actually can have a lot of agency in the way that you're responsive to others, even if they're not being responsive to you. One of my favorite studies that came out of Reis's lab was a study that found that if people were very different in their opinions, different parts of the political spectrum, just being a responsive listener lowered that person's card, they felt more open and willing to consider another point of view because you were being responsive to them.

So a lot of the ways that we want to focus ourselves towards a difference or a lack of say similarity in the way that we see the world, can be overcome by being a responsive and supportive listener.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Let's listen to Jean Nelson. She's an On Point listener in Austin, Texas, and she says daily interactions, especially during this season, provide an increased appreciation to her for people in general, and actually creates a positive feedback loop.

JEAN NELSON: I spend a lot of time planting flowers, blue bonnets, decorating the house for Halloween, et cetera. And what I've found in the 15 years that I've done this is people that I don't know stop and take the time and the effort to thank me for contributing to their day. I've had people stop on the street in their car to thank me for my work, to thank me for the joy that they bring to them, and that makes all the work for me worth it, and it really does make my day and make me feel better about people.

CHAKRABARTI: It's On Point listener Jean Nelson in Austin. Jeff and Andy, let me ask you a little bit more about this responsiveness aspect of how we live and operate in the social biome. Because there's obviously a very positive side to it and a not so positive side.

On the positive side, you write, and Jeff, I'll just first turn this to you. You write that making the effort even in these small interactions to get a better sense of how others understand the world can actually increase the benefit of those interactions for everybody.

HALL: Yeah, that's right.

So being able to make an understanding of where another person comes from is basically what other people are looking for. There's some really cool ideas in our field that looks at this concept that we're looking for understanding that a person shares the world around us in a similar way, that they have a shared understanding of what we see in the world and validates.

The perspective that we have in a very sort of epistemological sense, that is what communication does. It says, I see the world in this way, and do you see it similarly, is it true? Is it meaningful? When you're asking those kind of moments of insight about a person's feelings or their identity, of who they are, that is a powerful way to go past the surface of what they're talking about, which could be flowers or the neighborhood or their job, and say, I see the world in the way that you do, and I validate that it's true, or at least it's worth listening to.

But again, the whole argument of the book is that you don't have to engage in like a three-hour conversation over five cups of coffee to get to this level.

HALL: Isn't that funny? This is not like talking about a deep conversation. In fact, we know that this is very rare.

People do not have those deep, hour-long conversations very often in their days. And you can do this sort of moment of attentiveness and supportiveness really swiftly if you pay attention to it.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, but Andy, here's where my skepticism has to just nose its way into the conversation, because I don't know.

There's a million books out there right now about active listening. And just like hearing someone and then reflecting back what they say to them to show them that you've heard them, to make them feel heard. And I find it totally eye-rolling these days. Because anybody can hear what I say and then just reflect it back to me.

That's not going to make me feel heard. Because I'm not sure they actually listened. So the whole idea of, I'm not saying that you guys are claiming this, but my mind is going to this place where it's, just be a greater, a more active listener.

MEROLLA: Yeah, I think you're right to be skeptical of any advice about communication that sounds like it's a recipe, a dash of this and a little bit of this. This will make you a good communicator or lead to a positive interaction. Because that's just not how communication works. There's a lot, everything's filtered through meaning on the first part. So what, when you say, oh, this is what I heard you say, that can sound really supportive.

Or it can strike you as condescending, and maybe overly strategic. And it's really hard to predict that ahead of time, or to know. And the other thing I'll say is that with something like active listening. Of course, it's important to actively engage and listen to other people, but that's the first part, so you still have to respond, right?

You still have to then do a lot more. So there's so much more to these positive interactions than just a finite set of listening behaviors or paraphrasing or subtle encouragers, all the words you hear in that literature.

CHAKRABARTI: It's so true because I've become really cynical about this. And anytime I hear someone, as you said, maybe pulling from the recipe, my first response in my mind is, what latest business leadership book did you read, so that you're drawing what you learned on me?

But again, maybe I'm just overly skeptical. Is there a way though, again, in these small social interactions, to authentically not only have people feel like you're connecting with them, but to actually connect with them. I want to differentiate between what the other person feels versus true positive connection, Jeff.

HALL: I think we actually in some ways dodge that, to be honest. (LAUGHS) And the part of the reason for that is what makes something authentic actually can vary so much between people. I'll give you an example. I have a group of friends from high school that I'm going to meet up again with here in next week.

And what's authentic for connection with us is a lot of times just talking about the past, what's going on in our lives, talking about local events, the community, complaining about things, talking about our kids and our relationships. And I think in doing so, we're just creating an authentic moment where it's just space to be with one another.

To remember the fact that we met when we were like 15 years old and here we are still enacting it. That's authentic. So it's authentic because that it allows for the space to just comfortably engage. Authenticity is often used, I think, in popular culture, particularly as if it's, as you mentioned, a secret sauce, this recipe.

And what's difficult about that is that way of being authentic with my friends varies a lot with when I'm authentic with some of my other friends, which we like to have deeper conversations or ones where we like to give each other a hard time. So I think we really have to remember that relationships and communication are very various, but the idea of being responsive. The idea of choosing to be there and really giving your attention. And also prioritizing it is what we recommend in the book. Priority, choice and responsiveness.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. I can't believe I've waited this long to get to what I see as some of the major, you actually even identify these in the book, but the major structural impediments to creating a healthier social biome.

And phones. Number one, for a couple of reasons. One, is that online in social media, it's so ironic to me. Again, that the name social media came from this original hope back in its founding days, that it would be a place where people could have literally the kinds of small social interactions that we're talking about, but it's instead become one of the primary forces for toxicity in our lives.

So that's one issue that we're just being inundated with exactly the wrong forms of micro social interactions, but then also two. And Andy, I'll turn this one to you. Every example that I've brought up so far, it's people actually talking to each other or physically interacting. And I would argue that even just the sheer occurrence of that has gone down with everybody on their phones all the time.

MEROLLA: Yeah. In the most basic measurements of that idea, of people turning away from social interaction, especially face-to-face social interaction. If you look at time/use data, and many researchers have looked at this. There's been this 20 year steady decline in just how often people are outside the house, right? So people are staying home much more often. And COVID escalated that, but it was a trend that started before COVID, and we haven't fully recovered by any means. When you add in a phone, right? You can really tailor your attention further away.

So even when you're out in public, you're staring at your phone, or you have headphones in and that kind of insulates you further from the social world. What's difficult about studying social interaction and technology is that for all the problems that these phones create or social media creates, it also provides these opportunities, for family who are separated by great distances to stay in touch.

I think about like my son, who is lives thousands of miles away from his grandparents. He has a really close relationship with them. That's been pretty much created through FaceTime and so everything we've been talking about with communication, the effects are multiple and they're simultaneous.

So there's all of these positive and negative things happening simultaneously. But I 100% agree with your idea that there's a lot of structural impediments to connection that are made by devices, that are made by the institutions that govern our lives too.

CHAKRABARTI: Jeff, did you want to chime in on that?

HALL: Yeah, we know from social media research, and that's something I do a lot, is I research a lot of social media. It's how you use it. It's not the use itself. And Andy's example is a really good one. We've also seen just a massive shift to what social media means. The introduction of TikTok, made Meta products compete with that.

Prior to that, you had other sort of changes about trying to monetize the uses of it. So there have been really big changes in what social media even is, and it certainly is a far cry from what we used to have 20 years ago when it was founded. So I think we think about the idea of what social media has now become, it's become a very personalized way of watching streaming or broadcast media, where it's chopped up and repackaged in a little small segment that we can consume, plus a whole lot of, unfortunately, growing AI slop and other stuff.

But I think if we think about the phone, broadly speaking, what's very tricky about that is it's a both, and. The example that I like to give is when I lived in a fellowship and I was also in your neck of the woods, in Cambridge. I spent a lot of time texting my family and even when I was out in public and I knew I was alone and I could be talking to strangers and meet some fellow Bostonians.

I was like, no I'd prefer to keep texting my family and check in with them. Because I miss them so badly. So we have to also give space for the possibility that people when they're away from us in public. They're also taking care of important business in their own lives as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I love my fellow Bostonians, Jeff, but a lot of them probably didn't wanna meet you. (LAUGHS)

HALL: (LAUGHS) Fair enough. Fair enough.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. There's another aspect of, not just social media, but our current national political climate, which I want to ask you about. Because you both write in the book that it's not enough, or at least this is one of the takeaways I got, that it's not enough to have healthier, small scale social interactions with people who are just like us.

That the real benefit comes from having these kinds of interactions with people who are not like us. Different socioeconomic backgrounds, even different political backgrounds. And for a couple of decades now, there's been a great sorting of Americans, both on income and political lines. So I'm seeing that we we're actually living in communities right now Andy, that make it harder to get the full benefit from the kind of social biome that you wish we all had.

MEROLLA: Yeah, it's an important point and the fact is that people's sense of connection to one another is incredibly uneven. There's people out there who are doing just great and there's people who are really struggling. But even when we think about the people who have this really rich social life, if we start to think about, with whom do you connect?

And if it turns out that it's a lot of people who are very similar to them, share similar experiences, have similar viewpoints. That means that their viewpoints are never really being challenged in any way, or they're never being updated based on other people's experiences. And there can be a cost to that, right?

It makes you maybe less empathic to other people's experiences. And all of us have perspectives on the world that could use a little updating. That could be a little bit maybe, more inclusive of different types of experiences. And that comes from interacting with different types of people.

And that cuts across race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, there's so much research that talks about the importance of younger people interacting with older adults. Older neighbors who might live alone. Are we looking out for them? So it's not just about updating our personal perspectives, but it's about looking out for different types of people who might really need us.

It's not just about updating our personal perspectives, but it's about looking out for different types of people who might really need us.

Andy Merolla

CHAKRABARTI: On that point, let's go back to our listeners. This is Lisa from East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and she does say it's the little things, the daily interactions, that do stand out to her in our currently divided culture.

LISA: So I love just running into people when I'm pumping gas or I'm at the grocery store, and it's those times where you don't need to know what somebody's political leaning is, and people are just generally nice and decent to each other, I think, at the one-to-one level. And so that matters even more these days.

CHAKRABARTI: And here's a final one. This is Mary McGuire. She listens to On Point in Colorado. Her cat went missing about a week ago, and Mary tells us that the small interactions she's had while looking for her cat, that it's helped her meet and get to know neighbors she's never even spoken to before.

MARY McGUIRE: I started going from door to door, porch to porch, knocking on doors. Asking neighbors if I might look in their sheds, basements, other outbuildings, barns, et cetera. And the thing that I found, which just floored me, was that people were unfailingly kind, empathetic, generous, helpful. I found myself thinking that if we could just get rid of politics, that our country would soar.

CHAKRABARTI: So Jeff, this brings us to one of my biggest takeaways from the book. Is that you quote a researcher who says to not connect with others is in many ways not to hope. But when you do connect with others, you end up being part of a virtuous cycle that ends up building better social systems.

HALL: Yeah, no question. I love these two stories, by the way, and I'm so thankful that you brought them to our attention because one of the ways that I think about often is I feel so comfortable in the community that I live in and I care about my community.

In Lawrence, Kansas, I argue it's one of the best places to live, and I see our national scene, and it struggles and people feel very contentious. And I just try to reconcile this, like, why is it that people are so different from each other, feel so divided, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that if we pick the things that were the farthest away in our opinions, the furthest away in what we agree on, and only talk about that, like that's really missing what most of people's lives are about.

Most of people's lives are about the traffic and the weather and whether or not we had a good meal at a local place, or whether or not that new taco shop is awesome for carnitas or whatever.

That's what people's lives are made of, is our communities. Yet I think if we fixate on the ways in which that we're farther apart, we lose a sense of hope in one another. And hope creates a positive spiral. The more we invest in the idea that the people around us share our experience and are worth listening to.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.